Sue Coe (b. 1952) American, Standing Pig Print. Depicting a pig being held up by two men holding its front legs. Chains can be seen hanging from the ceiling. Numbered 12/18 in lower left. Signed and dated, '93 in lower right. Back of the piece says S.C. 9301 Ringling Press / Flatstone Studio Sarasota, FL 1993. Proceeds from this sale will benefit students at the Ringling College of Art & Design.

Size: 22 x 15 in. 

#8289 . 

Born in Tamworth, Staffordshire, England, Sue Coe, who had studied at the Royal College of Art in London, emigrated to the United States in 1972. She settled in New York City from where she has established a reputation as a sociopolitical artist, mostly doing charcoal drawings.  Her work references a wide range of 'not-easy-on-the-eyes' issues including the KKK, sweatshop conditions, animal rights, petroleum industry violations, apartheid, women's rights and AIDS.  Her goal is to educate her viewers and not to please them aesthetically.

Coe began her career in America as an illustrator for the op-ed page of The New York Times, and since that time has had drawings in many publications such as The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and Artforum.

Most of her charcoal drawings are intended to be devoid of her personality in order to free the viewer to focus on the subject.  However, an exception is a series, The Last 11 Days, which she made of her sixty-four year old mother dying of cancer.  To honor her mother's wishes to die at home, Coe and her sister returned to Liverpool, England to be with her.  Of this experience, Coe said that her mother was of a stoic generation that seldom revealed their true feelings and that she died as she lived.  Emphasizing emotional isolation, the resulting drawings are a "sharp contrast between the heavily worked charcoal and the empty paper background . . ."(Folan 20).  These drawings also reveal an emotional disconnect or tension between Coe and the situation in that the artist, doing a drawing each day, was able to document the decline scientifically and objectively while being much involved emotionally.  In 2005-2006, the series was a feature exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. (askart)